"I'll say that when we were doing Trek, I loved this idea — Now,
of course, I'm going to explain this whole thing, but then when
you say, well, there are 825 in 'Super 8,' I have no answer,"
started Abrams. "The reason I wanted to do it was I love the idea
that the future that they were in was so bright that it couldn't
be contained and it just sort of broke through —"

Colbert interjected saying, "Flares off the side of the
screen," and the "Star Trek" director continued with a
long impassioned response about his love for lens
flares.

"Every time I've seen a movie, if you look at 'Close Encounters,'
'Die Hard,' which was just referenced, it's an amazing thing that
anamorphic lens, which is a lens that ... There are spherical
lenses and there are anamorphic lenses that have a different kind
of compression," said Abrams. "What you do is you expand the
picture so on a 35 mm frame it gets basically crushed, and when
you project it you use a lens that uncrushes it. But, what
happens when you do that is you get these really cool oval
background — when the sun's out of focus — and lens flares on
anamorphic lenses, that are not coded, if you must know, had this
great streaky quality and I've always loved how that
looks."

"There are so many movies from my childhood that had those that
when we were shooting 'Star Trek' I remember saying to Dan
Mindel, the DP [director of photography], 'It would be so much
fun if we' — I didn't think we were going to have quite that
number of them, but it became this thing, and it was ridiculous,"
he said.

Abrams recalled Mindel bringing in these giant powerful halogen
spotlights called "best in show" on set and they would use them
while filming.

"It became this weird kind of artform of how to make the perfect
lens flares with different kind of lenses," said Abrams. "And it
was just this thing that sort of felt like it was a kind of
visual system for the movie."

The
full stage at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center where Colbert
and Abrams spoke for about 90 minutes November 21,
2015.Neil Grabowsky / Montclair Film
Festival

Abrams mentioned his obsession and love for lens flares started
to get him into trouble after 2009's "Star Trek."

"I just fell in love with how it looked, and I was starting to
get in trouble with it from people, because they were like,
'Enough already,'" he recalled. "And then I did 'Super 8,' and I
did a lot of them there, too."

However, it was when Abrams returned to work on "Star Trek Into
Darkness" that he really hit his tipping point with the art form.

"There was literally one scene where Alice Eve, who acts in the
movie, was so obliterated by a lens flare and I was
showing the scene to my wife Katie, who just said, 'Okay, you
know what? Enough. I can't see what this scene is about. Who
is standing there?'" Abrams recalled. 'I'm like, 'It's Alice
Eve.' And she's like, 'I cannot see her!'"

For those reasons, don't expect to see as many lens flares
in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

"So, I kind of pulled back, and as you'll see in the 'Star Wars'
movie, I've allowed lens flares to take a very back seat," said
Abrams.

They will be there, though.

One example of lens flares
you'll see in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."Lucasfilm

"There are a couple [scenes] where you have to have them though
because there's a giant — there's a moment where you go — we're
making sure that it looks photorealistic and photoreal," assured
Abrams. "But every time there could be a flare, because he
[visual effects supervisor, Roger Guyett] knows that I've liked
to do that a lot, I've said, 'This is not the movie. These are
not the flares you're looking for.'"